Pirate Bay judge faces threats, hacks

Mark Raby, 18th July 2011

The judge in one of the most infamous digital piracy cases to date has become a target for piracy advocates.
Justice Peter Charlton was at the helm of the landmark 2009 ruling when he allows an Internet service provider to block access to the Pirate Bay website, a site that had become a universal harbor for illegal file sharing.

Charleton said Pirate Bay was built on a "weird ideological basis" with the sole purpose of "stealing" copyrighted material.

However, Charleton was only a minor player in the legal ordeal. Internet company Eircom had already agreed to a deal with a consortium of companies under the name Irish Recorded Music Association, saying it would not contest a legal filing to block Pirate Bay access.

Although Pirate Bay still exists today, Charleton's ruling was seen by many as a hindrance to freedom of expression, and as such he has become the subject of ridicule, and worse.

In a recent Irish Times article, Charleton was quoted as saying that his life has been threatened, he's been a target for hackers, and some have even tried to implicate him for crimes he didn't commit.

"Threats were made that my life would be 'wrecked by computer.' The people in question, the cyber-terrorists, were proposing to hack into my computer to get my credit card and other details, order any number of pizzas for my greedy gut and get call girls to turn up to my door and plant child pornography on my work computers," the judge said.

There are judges who preside over first-degree murder and torture charges who never come under such scrutiny, so to face this kind of backlash for what will go down as a relatively minor mark on the legal landscape seems rather ludicrous.

But despite all the attempts, no one has managed to take down Charleton, with one exception. "My computer is so slow that I have stopped using it. So, they did get their revenge," he said.